Overview

A wonderful, inventive first novel set primarily during WW2, and told through the disparate lives of identical twins; one a fighter pilot, the other a school teacher. When they are born the maid ties a luggage label around Tom's ankle. It is the only way to tell him and William apart. Years later, the loop of string remains; two ordinary boys growing up in England between the wars. Their mother is mostly absent. Their father too has his secrets. Across the road the neighbours watch them become young men. Tom takes after his daredevil uncle, captured by his vision of the aeroplane, how it soars and turns. William is entranced by the power of verse, by words that claim to speak of freedom. And then the war comes. In 1940, Tom is a Spitfire pilot, battling in the skies above Kent. William, a teacher in a progressive school, embarks on a journey of discovery that will end in Canterbury. How will they fare, the pilot and the pilgrim?

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* Praise for THE NAVIGATION LOG 'Quirky, literate, funny...an assured, enjoyable book' DAILY MAIL

An immensely readable debut, a kind of British Rich Man, Poor Man, set during the early days of the Battle of Britain. Twin brothers William and Tom Anderson, who will prove quite different temperamentally, are born in 1918 to the sound of armistice bells ringing in the end of WWI. In brief chapters summarizing events of succeeding years, we observe the boys' childhood through early manhood-often through the eyes of their gossipy neighbors, widowed Marigold Jennings and spinster Miss Betty. Corrick overuses this catty pair, though once in a while their pseudoaphoristic observations strike home (e.g., Devotion is no basis for marriage, a perverse truism illustrated by the boys' incompatible parents). Through 1939, we watch William turn scholarly and poetic (with a taste for Tennyson), while Tom surrenders himself to the poetry of aviation. The bulk of the tale covers the year 1940, as Tom becomes a Spitfire pilot hopefully pursuing an elusive woman flyer. William, meanwhile, marries an older woman doctor and secures a teaching position at Liberty Hall, a progressive school for preadolescents run by a Panglossian, Blake-quoting obsessive and eccentric neatly named Masterman ( My pedagogic aim is the abolition of irrational belief ). Parallel scenes (often too brief to fully register) detail Tom's fateful progression toward an airfight over the English Channel, and the mock-Chaucerian pilgrimage to Canterbury undertaken by Masterman and company when Liberty Hall is commandeered by the British Army. The introduction of such marginally involved, though thematically crucial, characters as rescued Polish refugee Janosz Pasenik intensifies the skillfully tangled separate stories, which dovetail toward a satisfying close, in a momentarily peaceful churchyard echoing with complex images of death and rebirth. A little too pat and intermittently predictable to qualify for Masterpiece Theater. But the BBC should be quick to snap it up. (Kirkus Reviews)

The Second World War provides a stage which is almost irresistible to writers, and has become more so as the drama of the years between 1939 and 1945 has become less a part of modern memory and more a set of historical events. This is a simple story, told with all the art necessary to make it interesting and involving. Twins Tom and William are 21 when war breaks out; Tom joins the Air Force and becomes one of the Few, while William, a pacifist, becomes a master at an experimental private school. While Tom flies Spitfires over the channel, William embarks on a pilgrimage to Canterbury with his eccentric headmaster and some pupils. For once, there is no painful split between the brothers, but mutual understanding; the climax is when Tom shoots down a German pilot who crashes into a church in the village where William and his pupils are lodging. The link between the country above the clouds, serene except for the splutter of machine-gun fire, and the countryside below, serene but for the sound of combat from above, is beautifully done, and the diverging fates of the two brothers are shown not in cruel contrast but with a tender sympathy. The marvel is that a story of which the plot is almost clear in the first 50 pages should be so engrossing. This is a wonderfully simple but artful piece of writing, in which the atmosphere of the time and its effect on two brothers becomes a universal parable. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

A graduate of the creative writing MA at UEA, Martin Corrick was formerly a lecturer in literature and creative writing at the University of Southampton. He lives in Gloucestershire.

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